Ektron Customers Monday

7:30AM: Breakfast

Breakfast

8:40AM: Welcome to Ascend with President and CEO, Mark Duffell

​Join us in general session as Episerver President and CEO Mark Duffell kicks off proceedings. Hear his assessment of our business over the last year and our goals and plan for the year ahead, and learn how to get the best out of this year's Ascend conference.

Join Episerver Executive Vice President of Strategy and CMO James Norwood to get right up-to-date on Episerver’s vision and product strategy for 2018 and beyond. You'll understand what Episerver's product roadmap for digital content, commerce, and marketing means to you and how it translates into significant investments we’ve made in areas such as cross-channel campaign management, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous personalization, all designed to empower you to achieve continuous one-to-one engagement with your customers through truly immersive experiences.

9:40AM: Keynote: Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, Research Director at Gartner- Martech’s Role on the Journey to Exceptional Customer Experiences

Customer experience is today’s defining battlefield. Brands must evolve to meet customers how and where they want to engage. Kirsten will explore the art of the possible and discuss how companies at all levels of marketing maturity can exploit new capabilities in the digital marketing ecosystem. From content, commerce, mobile, and social to personalization, IoT, and artificial intelligence – brands are blending teams and technology to tailor the customer journey and extend the right experience to build customer lifetime value. With her unique blend of professional experience, enterprise marketing benchmarks, and analyst insight, Kirsten will invite participants to take action to move them beyond improved websites to enhanced customer journeys that can yield business results and brand advocacy.

10:25AM: Break

Break

10:45AM: Roadmap: Episerver CMS

With our continuous delivery cycle, Episerver continues to improve upon and expand our CMS offering. In this session, we will provide an overview of the direction we are going with Episerver CMS and how our plans will positively impact your business.

10:45AM: LAB: Extending Episerver in Five Easy Ways

The Episerver Digital Experience Cloud was designed and built for extensibility. The Episerver API enables developers to easily create robust templates, modules and plug-ins that enhance the user experience for your site visitors and staff alike. Join us as we discuss five simple ways to extend your existing Episerver implementation to create a better path to conversion for your customers.

11:30AM: Roadmap: Episerver Find

Episerver continues to improve Episerver Find, its Enterprise search solution built in to the Digital Experience Cloud. In this session, hear more about the direction we're headed with Find and how it will positively impact your business.

12:00PM: Lunch

Lunch

1:00PM: Keynote: Troy Hunt

Hear from Troy Hunt, a noted cybersecurity expert, author, educator and founder of data breach search aggregator, Have I Been Pwned? In 2011, Hunt was named a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Developer Security. He was also named a Microsoft Regional Director in 2016.

2:15PM: Tips & Tricks: Data-driven Marketing

Learn how to use data to identify your visitors' biggest issues and work methodically to remove barriers to your website so your visitors can complete what they came to do. In this session, we'll demystify what a cruel experience in digital channels really means and why common advice on how to treat visitors is nonsense. Joakim Holmquist will also provide concrete examples of how to work smart with Episerver, Google Analytics, Facebook & Google inspired by some of our coolest customers.

2:15PM: Football at scale: Delivering a platform to empower the English Football League

Future-proof. Personalization. Flexibility. Being one of the largest club associations in the UK, the English Football League (EFL) needed a new platform to do all of these things and manage their 65 football club websites. Whilst maintaining some level of standardization, it was equally important that each website portrayed themselves uniquely serving the needs of a global fan-base. Join Paul Diamond, Client Services Director, and Dave Malins, Technical Director at Realise, to find out how they shaped a vision to ignite the passion of football fans and provide 65 clubs with a platform that delivered commercial success too. We will show you the process that allowed us to successfully deliver the largest Global Episerver Digital Experience Cloud implementation project in just 9 months, across all devices and in real-time - harnessing the power of Episerver.

How an ecommerce-led digital transformation is helping redefine content and a new shared services model. A successful first year on Episerver for a global enterprise.

3:00PM: LAB: Three ways to drive traffic to your website

Automatic landing pages have made attracting new visitors to your site much easier. This means you don't need to create new landing pages for all types of search phrases that visitors may use. During this session, we'll show and tell you how to use this feature, as well as provide more tips for attracting new visitors to your site.

3:00PM: Customer Spotlight: Enabling a Digitally Agile Salesforce

We are surrounded by digitally savvy, self-directed buyers; there are more of them involved in every B2B buying decision; and technology is accelerating the change. How do our sales people meet these challenges? Learn how Xerox is developing its direct and indirect salesforce into digitally agile, trusted advisors using Episerver, mobile apps, social selling and marketing automation.

3:45PM: Break

Break

4:15PM: How to Measure ROI from Customer Experience Improvements on Episerver

Measuring the Return on Investment of Customer Experience improvements can be a very elusive thing. Improvements in CX should drive real business value, however, how do we actually measure the value? This session will include industry examples and applied best practices of how you can use the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud to activate highly personalized and relevant experiences that engage users and drive measurable ROI to the business.

5:00PM: Monday Night Mixer

As the 1st day at Episerver Ascend comes to a close, it’s time to step out of the sessions and labs, and into our Monday Night Mixer, featuring good conversation and even better libations. This year, we are combining the Code Bash with our Welcome Reception sposnored by Microsoft.